It is not hubris or hyperbole to say that Hubble 3D has to be seen to be believed. In its scant 43 minutes, the film reveals some of the most astonishing images your eyes will ever see. And every single one of them is real.

To gaze up at the heavens and ponder what exists beyond the fragility of this “pale blue dot” and the cosmic sea that envelops it is as primal a pursuit as humankind has ever embarked upon. We, as a species, have always looked to the heavens with a childlike sense of awe and wonder to try and ascertain where we fit. As Galileo cracked open the universe and allowed us to peer inside, so too has the Hubble Space Telescope permitted us to peel back the inky void and see further than ever before. This conduit to the cosmos, easily the most celebrated scientific instrument of our time, has decoded some of astronomy’s most immovable mysteries—the age of the universe, the rate of its expansion and the existence of black holes. But it is the hundreds of thousands of breathtaking images the telescope took over the course of 20 years—neighboring planets, the slow-motion collision of galaxies, cometary impacts, nebulae and, greatest of them all, the Hubble Deep Field images—for which this extraordinary tool will be best remembered.

This is not director Toni Myers’ (Space Station 3D) first film in outer space. She has made five previous IMAX documentaries that took place in low-Earth orbit, including one of Hubble’s initial deployment. With Hubble 3D, she completes the circle. Myers and Co. installed a 700-pound IMAX 3D camera in Atlantis’ cargo bay and trained the astronauts how to use it, while also positioning HD cameras at various spots throughout the spacecraft.

Hubble 3D which accumulated IMAX footage over a course of more than two decades, charts the school-bus sized instrument’s construction, its 1990 launch into orbit, the infamous malfunction, successive servicing missions and finally 2009’s STS-125 rendezvous, the most complex and perilous of them all, during which spacewalking surgeons spent days in the vacuum of space, retrofitting Hubble’s instruments one final time. IMAX cameras were also there for the shuttle crew’s training, much of it in Houston’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, two spectacular, thunderous launches and the astronauts going about their routines inside the shuttle, frolicking in zero gravity. Extraordinary as these six story images are, they are, admittedly, familiar. However, the thing that will cause you to gasp out loud, assuming you have any breath left in your lungs, are the film’s 3-D fly-throughs.

Hubble 3D took the telescope’s ultra high-definition images, crunched the data in supercomputers and utilizing state-of-the-art CGI, created the illusion of three-dimensional space itself. We do not simply see a Deep Field composite of a hundred billion shimmering galaxies 50 trillion miles from Earth, we soar through them at Star Trek-like warp speed. We don’t just look at a static image of the Orion Nebula, we plow into it, arcing gracefully this way and that through ribbons of phosphorous color. We hover over the flotsam of a supernova, gaze at incubating stars in an interstellar nursery and peer into the ravenous maw of the super massive black hole at the center of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Though Leonardo DiCaprio narrates the film, he knows well enough to stay mostly reverentially quiet at times like these. These images, as close to real as human beings are likely to ever see, contain tremendous gravitas, imparting a universe of unspeakable detail and awe, and incomprehensible scale.

“The legacy of Hubble is almost impossible to quantify,” director Toni Myers told me in a recent interview conducted for “Ad Astra” magazine. “It has completely changed the way we think of the universe. You can get lost for days in Hubble’s astonishing images. [It has] popularized astronomy for the world. Hubble took deep space and put it in our laps.”

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio
Directed by Toni Myers
Rated G
Running Time: 43 minutes